And so, folks, it finally arrived ... the day that Sharon entered into the Mitchell fold once more. Sharon's song for Phil? The Chapel of Love? Well, a hotbed of lies, deceit and misunderstanding, the likes of which we've all been eagerly awaiting for months now.
Take a gander at the reviews for this week, followed by an overall assessment.
There are no words to describe the tension I felt throughout that episode. Worse, my tension had heightened tenfold by the end. Am I criticising this? No, not at all. This is the sort of cliffhanger which means bums on seats for the next episode.
Pitch perfect.
The Interfering Ian.
Surprisingly, the weak link in this whole episode was Ian and his sudden appearance just as Sharon is about to leave for the Register Office in Friday's episode. His part in this, and the inclusion of the unseen and newly-often mentioned Michelle, are my only niggles with this episode. I felt that what he had to offer today was an unnecessary contrivance, as much as a filler, to lengthen the episode. It was as though the writers didn't have enough script or scenes to fill the timeslot, when someone decided - "Ooh, wait ... let's have Ian try to stop Sharon."
It's bad enough that Michelle's husband, Tim, has been written entirely out of her equation, but I'm saying that Michelle never had a real problem with Phil Mitchell. Her problem lay with Grant, but she couldn't have had that big a problem with him if she slept with him after the fact. Yes, Ian's had some bad experiences with Phil in the past, but he's wrong in assessing that Phil "ruined" Kathy - Kathy did a pretty good job of ruining herself. No one twisted her arm to marry Phil or to sleep with the younger vicar or even to sleep with Grant. So like Sharon, Kathy has slept with both of the Mitchell brothers. The ruination of Ben might be a discussion worth having, but Ben had problems enough when he arrived, as evidence by his clouting Freddie Mitchell and keeping schtum about it, allowing Little Mo to be hoisted up on an accusation of child abuse.
Any rate, whatever Ian had to say - and it was a big load of nothing - was irrelevant. I kept wanting Sharon to push past him in the Vic and thank him very much for his concern, but her marriage was none of his business. In the end, she had to resort to tricking him in order to go ahead with what she wanted to do. I was near close to screaming at him to shut up.
Da-Do-Run-Ron-Ron.
Whoda thunk it? I'm enjoying the Mitchell Sisters again. Of course, that might all change tomorrow, but they've suddenly become interesting again - especially the way they were wafting home truths at each other tonight. Maybe it's Ronnie's hormones, but she's suddenly likeable again, if not utterly nonsensical.
Think of it: Ronnie leaves a couple of months ago, pregnant, and returns in her fifth month. (Is it me, or wasn't it about this time four years ago that she confessed to Peggy, as Peggy was leaving, that she was five months pregnant - which would have meant she was impregnated by a comatose Jack - I mean really comatose). She's visably pregnant, and it's not rocket science that Roxy can suss that Charlie is the daddy, and if Roxy can suss that, so can Charlie. Instead of staying away, the way she vowed she would, she wades into the battle zone, declaring that this is her baby, and she'll raise it alone - because every time she hooks up with a man who makes her pregnant, things have a way of ending in tragedy.
First, there was Joel, then Jack and now ... uh-oh ... things happen in threes.
The funny thing about Ronnie, which Roxy sees and which Ronnie won't admit, is that Ronnie is the biggest sort of moral coward, albeit she likes to present herself as the strong woman; but Roxy is right. Ronnie is always running away from complicated situations. That's been her creed since God was a boy. When the going gets tough, Ronnie gets going. Away. Things get tough, and she's off to Ibiza - or was, until she was deported. Roxy gets pregnant - she's off to Ibiza. Jack dumps her - she's off to Ibiza. She gets out of prison - and wants to go to Ibiza. Kills a man - and runs to Ibiza. Now it's same shit, different place. Gets pregnant by the local bog-cleaner-cum-phoney-policeman-possible-psychopath-like-her-son-of-the-legendary-original-psycho and now she runs to Portugal. I wonder if she told Peggy she were pregnant by Nick Cotton's son? Peggy would have gagged a maggot and been on the phone to Dot in a trice. I can hear it now.
Peggy: 'Ere, Dot, wot's this I hear about your Nick's son gettin' Ronnie up the duff?
Dot: Ooh, I say, Peggy, mah Nick's dean. Aint you got no respect for them wot's gone before?
So here's Ronnie, doing what she does best - dashing back to the Square, just long enough for Charlie to catch sight of her being enceinte, and then she'll hope to dash off to Portugal, or else she'll stay on the Square long enough to play cat-and-mouse with him.
The gist is that Ronnie always runs away.
Then Ronnie turns the tables on Roxy, when she learns that Roxy is now the mistress of a man who maintains a wife and child in Latvia. Roxy's excuse is classic.
~It's not really that kind of marriage. It's more of a marriage on paper.~
Roxy can convince herself all she wants that she's OK with Aleks's situation, but at the end of the day, she isn't. Aleks's child will always come before Roxy, and with the child, comes the wife. The big surprise was Roxy taking on Ronnie's words of encouragement to get Aleks to commit to her or prove commitment and confronting him, demanding proof and wanting their relationship taken further, yet what Roxy doesn't realise is that Aleks is using her suggestion as a means of getting out of town and away from the imminent arrival of his wife and child. Of course, those were all the "wrong numbers" to which a cynically laconic Tamwar referred.
Happiness Is a Warm Gun.
Linda Henry must really be a good actress, because she was so convincing as a totally unsympathetic and vile character tonight. I felt not one jot of sympathy for Shirley. The absolute nadir of Shirley came with her confrontation with Phil at the Register Office. According to Shirley, Phil chose Sharon because of Ben. It was all about Ben, accusing Phil of choosing Sharon because he knew Shirley would never accept Ben. Shirley reiterates that she had chosen Phil.
What?
Just because Shirley has repeatedly walked away from her children and chose various men at various times over her kids, doesn't mean that other people will do the same. She really thought that Phil would walk away from Ben? Really? What was that remark you made to Billy tonight, Shirley? That you knew Phil better than anyone? How long have you known him, Shirl? Seven years? Shirley's sense of entitlement is a wonder to behold, as much as her incessant childishness - the smirks at all the possibilities that Sharon was going to back out of the wedding, the hopeful little cynical smile at the thought that this was the wedding from hell - but when reality bites that entitlement in the arse, what does she do? At the first sign that the marriage had gone through, she reaches for the biggest bottle of vodka she can find - from behind the bar, of course - and starts to cry, feel sorry for herself and drink ... because all of this isn't Shirley's fault.
Shirley's history with Phil should consist of this, and she should remember it and learn from it, in light of what happened tonight. Three years ago, Phil couldn't promise fidelity to Shirley. Wouldn't promise it. Because, he said, "that's the way I am." Tonight, he handed her a pithy assessment of their latest affair:-
I got it wrong.
Meaning that Shirley is a mistake.
Of course, Shirley's found Sharon's gun, and goodness knows what she thought to make Phil think of that. As soon as he would have seen it, he would have recognised it and - if he were thinking clearly and found his innate intelligence he'd lost of late, he'd have realised that this was the gun that Ronnie wanted to leave and which he thought she'd taken. You know, when she ran away the last time.
But now Shirley's got the gun and she's got a drink under her belt, and the final scene was a cracker. (Pun intended)
But who will she shoot? (Because I'm convinced that it's Shirley who'll fire the gun).
Sharon and Phil.
The only thing I can say to this is: At last. They've been ducking and diving this for 20 years, as much as Shirley is wrong about Sharon "choosing" Grant over Phil. She chose to return to her husband at the time. We all know that the marriage, if it continues, is going to be hard going. We know that the big secret about Phil's pre-nuptual infidelity with Shirley hasn't been revealed, but that reveal is incipient. Phil still has that secret. Sharon's secret, of course, is the gun, and she's blissfully unaware that this has anything now to do with the situation; but I would say that Phil's secret is infinitely worse than Sharon's and the reason behind her having that weapon.
Knowing that all of this is around the corner, I indulged myself and allowed myself to smile and be happy for Sharon and Phil for a fraction of a second. To see them both genuinely smile and then ride onto the Square in a horse-drawn carriage, eerily reminiscent of the way Frank and Pat rode back onto the Square years ago, was nice and a nice tip to the past.
Days of Future Past: Hints of things to come:-
- When and how did Sal get the idea that Lola was Jay's girlfriend? IIRC, she's only seen Lola once - when she arrived for Roxy's hen night last November. Did she even see the two of them together? And Ben, stirring things further with Abi, telling her that Jay's been in love with Lola for ages. Errrr ... Ben's been inside for well over a year. He's only just re-connected with Jay. Has Jay spoken exclusively to Ben about Lola during that short time? Because a few weeks ago, he was dead keen on getting to Bolton with her.
- Aunt Sal and Dot - a match made in heaven. Sal should stick around a bit more and interfere. She was seconds away from telling Dot about Ronnie's pregnancy. Ooh, I say.
- What was Lauren wearing? She and Peter bore me, and putting her in the briefest of dresses does nothing to hide the fact that the actress has no talent.
- Tosh has got to have the highest set of principles on the Square, and such sanctimony does her no good. She and Tina deserve one another. Tina's lied and cheated on Tosh, and now Tosh has cheated and told the truth to Tina. It doesn't matter that she was drunk, she still slept with Dean. Hang on ... Tina slept with Billy when she was drunk. Is someone trying to say that when lesbians get drunk, they forget they're lesbians? They're another pair of irrelevancies about whom I could care less.
Still, I didn't let that minutiae spoil my enjoyment of the episode.
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